AB 109 and realignment have the potential to change the way that we do business at the county level and the state level. Thus, it is disappointing that despite the fact that the process in Yolo County brought the stakeholders together, the plan became less about getting things right and more about protecting one’s funding source and thus one’s turf.
However, not only did the process become a turf protection plan, but the vast majority of partners were situated on the law enforcement side. It is notable that the plan that went forward to the board was opposed by Public Defender Tracie Olson, and the Court Executive was not present when the vote was taken.
It is perhaps remarkable, in all of this, that the strongest voice of protest on the Board of Supervisors was Don Saylor.
“What concerns me is that, of the $3.3 million that we initially allocated,” he said on Tuesday, “only $88,000 of that was designated for mental health.”
“This is not about how we can be soft on crime,” Don Saylor said in dissent. “It’s about how we protect public safety in the long term. I don’t feel we’re there, the budget is not what I hoped it would be and I’m not going to support it.”
The stakeholders were quick to cry poverty and suggest that $3 million is not sufficient for the kinds of programs we need. But Don Saylor is absolutely correct when he argues that once we start off on the wrong trajectory, it will be difficult to impossible to course-correct.
On the other hand, Supervisor Jim Provenza said, “I just disagree that we’re starting off on the wrong foot. We’re actually doing something that no one else in the state has done – and that is bring all of the parties together to work on community corrections and to make it work.”
But it is those not sitting at the table that perhaps have as much to offer.
Bob Schelen, chair of the Yolo County Mental Health Board, told the board, “The budget as it is currently written should be rejected because there does not appear to us to be enough money for treatment programs, for job training programs, and for a number of other programs that are important to the entire process of realignment.”
The plan and program, he argued, was balanced, but the dollars do not reflect that balance.
“We need to put the dollars into the innovative programs that we think would be helpful for this realignment program,” Mr. Schelen added.
“The reason why we’re here,” said retired Public Defender Barry Melton, “is that the state prison system blew it and didn’t spend adequate resources on health and mental health.”
While the DA’s office represented by Jonathan Raven may disagree, arguing, “To say that the CCP plan is emulating CDCR is really just not fair, not true, and a little bit insulting actually. CCP understands that the mental health issue is important, unfortunately the pie is not as large as we’d like it to be.”
The truth is that, at best, this is CDCR-lite.
Yolo Judicial Watch, having observed cases for the last two years, suggested to the Board that they observe cases in the Yolo County Court.
On Friday of last week, we observed a lady, convicted of possession of heroin with the intent to sell, receive an 11-year sentence at Monroe Detention Center.
Under realignment, no longer will such cases end up in prison. Instead, they become the county’s responsibility.
One person who was silent at Tuesday’s meeting was the lone dissenter, Public Defender Tracie Olson.
“We can no longer continue with business as usual,” she told the Vanguard later. “I bristle when I hear folks talk about how the jail will have to accommodate 19-year sentences and what a burden that will be on the jail.”
“Well, maybe someone should stop and figure out whether a 19-year sentence on a non-violent, non-serious, and non-sex offense for a non-violent, non-serious, and non-sex offender is appropriate in the first place,” she said.
“In my opinion, the appropriate response to such an offender is to try to figure out why the offender keeps getting into trouble and to offer services to fix the offender’s underlying problems. It’s only then that we as a community can reasonably expect that the offender’s behavior will change,” she concluded.
And that means looking into those “evidence-based” programs and strategies that could be funded but are not.
The fact is that we could have a lot more resources, if we simply changed the way we did business.
In early October, the Sacramento Bee had an editorial that looked at changing pretrial detention.
They wrote, speaking of Sacramento, though undoubtedly the principle should apply to all counties, “Only one-third of the county’s 4,100 jail inmates are serving a sentence imposed by a court. The rest are suspects who have been arrested and accused of a crime but who are awaiting trial.”
As we have previously noted, in Yolo County, a sizable portion of those individuals end up serving time in jail pre-trial, and then are given some sort of probation, often in conjunction with a jail sentence.
Wrote the Bee, “Sacramento Superior Court had a ‘pretrial program’ from 1983 to 2009 to determine which people were of low risk to commit a new crime or not appear in court and could be released pending trial. Low-risk defendants could go back to their jobs and families while awaiting trial – checking in or being monitored with an ankle bracelet rather than losing income and jobs.”
“The program was a casualty of underuse and budget cuts,” they wrote.
However, they believe reviving that program would shave 10 to 15 percent of the pretrial population, which in Sacramento County, at least, frees up 274 to 410 jail beds.
The cost, they believe, is a tremendous savings, $100 a day for incarceration versus about $2.50 a day for pretrial screening and supervision.
Yolo County is proposing spending 30% of its allotment on more jail beds and another chunk on more sheriffs.
This is all money that could be going into the kinds of programs that would actually work to reduce recidivism, and along with it, the incarcerated population whether at Monroe or CDCR.
But the CCP process has failed us there. We are simply shifting money around, restoring funding to local departments, and all the while we are largely continuing the failed policies of CDCR by sentencing non-violent, non-sex, non-serious offenders to years in county custody when we should be asking ourselves if that approach works.
Simply put, the money it takes to put the heroin dealer in jail could be better used to help heroin addicts kick their addiction and give the heroin dealer the job training she needs to get out of that walk of life.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
[quote]The stakeholders were quick to cry poverty and suggest that $3 million is not sufficient for the kinds of programs we need. [/quote]
Bingo!
Insufficiency of funds is no excuse for poor usage of the available funds.
Incarceration of the non serious, non violent, non sex offender at the expense of prevention programs and the less expensive in home supervision is in my opinion extremely short sighted and costly.
As in medicine where it is much less costly to prevent serious illness such as diabetes than it is to treat the serious sequelae, I cannot fathom how prevention would not be more cost effective in the justice system if the funds were so allocated. An allocation of 2.6% of the total alllocation to Yolo County for mental health services is to me a travesty and a total misallocation of funds.
[quote]An allocation of 2.6% of the total alllocation to Yolo County for mental health services is to me a travesty and a total misallocation of funds. [/quote]
So here is my question for you: How much of the allocation should be spent on mental health services? Because we also need to know what percentage of prisoners are mentally ill, and just what proportion of the money do we want to spend on the mentally ill… probably a difficult question to answer…
David
Would you feel differently if the case you mentioned was a heroin addict and not a dealer. To me the latter is somewhat harder to justify as no jail time. Interested in your reasoning here!
Perhaps I should be clearer on where I am going with this. Here’s the problem as I see it. We want to fund all sorts of programs: drug rehab, mental health, job training, drug court, etc. If the percentage of prisoners who are mentally ill turns out to be 10%, do we spend 10% of the $3 million on mental health? $300,000 for a mental health program is a drop in the bucket of what it cost. What percentage of the prisoners are drug addicted? 50% Do we allocate 50% of the funds on drug rehab? A program that is notoriously unsuccessful, from what I have read? Again, this type of assessment and ability to put such programs in place takes TIME AND MONEY…
Let’s take a quick look at what percentage of the money a couple of other counties have received that have gone to mental health or other “treatment”-related services: Contra Costa County got $4,500,000 – a 1/3 more than Yolo – and they are putting close to 20% of their $$ toward health services (see: http://www.cpoc.org/php/realign/coplans/contracosta.pdf). Fresno County (whose budget I could not find online) has a well thought out plan that also utilizes funding from SB 678 Community Corrections Performance Act (2009) to create evidence-based, data-driven programs that include opening a wing of the jail, creating a day reporting center where probationers can receive training, classes to counter criminologic thinking. Tulare County (see: http://www.cpoc.org/php/realign/coplans/tulare.pdf) is forming a Mental Health Multi-Disciplinary Assessment Team funded by Probation that is hiring staff (including a psychologist) to provide services and oversight. (They are also buying cars, weapons, and other equipment for PO’s so not to worry.) They are also putting together a Victim Offender Reconciliation Program – a pretty progressive type of program for a small Valley county. Several of the county plans I have seen include discussions of needs assessment, case load to risk level ratios for probations officers, and even evaluation programs. The plan I have seen for Yolo has none of this. It talks about a 1:50 caseload for PO’s but doesn’t break that down into low, moderate, and high risk offenders. It doesn’t talk about the fact that many inmates in the jail are pre-trial and with innovative programs could be released to community supervision – making room for the inmates who are adjudicated to the jail.
Elaine, why are we allowing the Sheriff (and god knows we have a progressive sheriff) to hire new deputies (not correctional officers for the new beds – so they can write reports and appear in court) rather than put that money toward risk assessments and other treatment-related options. Drug treatment outcomes vary by setting, whether it is legally mandated, and of course by patient characteristics. There is evidence that mandated treatment – whether in custody or via drug court programs – can be an effective treatment for users. I think it’s inaccurate to say they are “notoriously unsuccessful.” Like everything else, it’s complicated.
Yes, part of the issue is time and money. But it’s also the attitude that the program has going in. If the first priority is custodial related, then the first item on the agenda is how many beds in the jail we need, how many new vests for the CO’s, etc. rather than thinking about how to deal with the variety of problems that the individuals who are coming may have. This is simply not a progressive plan. It’s insulting to me as a Yolo County resident to have a Chief Deputy (and probably the DA himself) who doesn’t get it that, as David writes, this is just CDCR-lite.
[quote]While the DA’s office represented by Jonathan Raven may disagree, arguing, “To say that the CCP plan is emulating CDCR is really just not fair, not true, and a little bit insulting actually.[/quote]
Considering that $88,000 of 3.3 million is only 2.7%, and CDCR spends over 4.5% of their budget on mental health I would say that CDCR should be the one feeling insulted.
ERM
“probably a difficult question to answer”
Absolutely. Especially since the questions you have raised about the percentage of mentally illl in the system, while a critical point, only begins to scratch the surface of the issue. The issues involve not only the percentage of mentally I’ll within the system, but also the disproportionate cost of keeping them incarcerated. This frequently involves special, and more expensive, housing needs, the services of specially trained nurses, psychologists and psychiatrists, increased numbers of correctional personnel for transfer and suicide watches, costs of psychotropic medications, specialists and consultants to train all of these folks and to work out the details of policies and procedures specific to the prison setting to remain within the now federally mandated standards, to say nothing of the expense of programs designed to reintegrate these sometimes very fragile folks back into the community.
From your pasts posts, I believe that you see this primarily as the “state dumping its problem” on the counties. I see it as a much more integrated and inclusive problem. After all, the state did not get these prisoners out of thin air. It got them from the communities where the crimes occurred. Thus, who ends up in prison in the first place is not the function of some distant and distinct entity called “the state”. The responsibility for this problem is on all of us. The voters who have consistently come down on the side of ‘tough on crime” without thought about unintended adverse consequences or the possibility of adequately funding alternatives to incarceration as means of promoting community safety, the prosecutors who play on this mentality for career building, the politicians who depend on stirring up fear of crime to keep getting elected. I believe that it will take a concerted and collaborative effort involving all levels of involvement from the individual voter, officials at the city, county, state and federal level to even begin to address the mess that is corrections in Callifornia today.
[quote]Elaine, why are we allowing the Sheriff (and god knows we have a progressive sheriff) to hire new deputies (not correctional officers for the new beds – so they can write reports and appear in court) rather than put that money toward risk assessments and other treatment-related options. Drug treatment outcomes vary by setting, whether it is legally mandated, and of course by patient characteristics. There is evidence that mandated treatment – whether in custody or via drug court programs – can be an effective treatment for users. I think it’s inaccurate to say they are “notoriously unsuccessful.” Like everything else, it’s complicated. [/quote]j
Perhaps I did not make my point well enough. My feeling is that the grandiose plans that some have, for mental health programs, job training programs, drug rehab programs, drug courts, etc., are very expensive and take time to put in place. Secondly, it is not clear what percentage to spend on each of these programs. Thirdly, many of these types of programs, if not implemented properly, are notoriously unsuccessful. So I again go back to the time factor – it takes a certain amount of lead time to plan such programs, so that we won’t just be spinning wheels or creating programs that do not work.
Do I think plans should go forward for these types of programs? Perhaps, if they work. I don’t want to waste more tax dollars on programs that expend tons of tax dollars with little efficacy in addressing the underlying problems. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that the state is sloughing off its responsibilities back on counties, without giving them the necessary time and funding to institute such programs. That is why I am not quite ready to demonize our elected officials quite yet. I think you have to give them some time to get this right. And I suspect it will take some community involvement and push to go in a different direction. Remember, thus far, a tough on crime stance seems to have resonated w the public, and that mindset will be difficult to overcome bc it seems to have worked – the crime rate is lower… it is hard to argue w success…
[quote]After all, the state did not get these prisoners out of thin air. It got them from the communities where the crimes occurred. [/quote]
Thanks for your thoughtful post. Even if the state received prisoners from our local communities, the state still had the primary responsibility for housing those prisoners. It will take time to readjust the system and the mindset of local officials to take on such a monumental task of the state. I would like to think the local gov’t will be more capable of “getting it right” than the state. Local control is often better… but it is going to take time, education, a paradigm shift…
Elaine
First, I want to let you know how much I value the ability to discuss these issues thoughtfully.
I would like to add a somewhat different perspective to how much time has been available for officials at all levels to reassess, educate and make changes to our approach to the interrelated problems of overcrowding,
provision of adequate health care services and mental health care services both in our prisons and in our communities.
Based on the following, I do not believe that anyone with any direct knowledge of our prison system was caught unawares or not ” provided with enough time” to prepare:
1) 1991 Coleman case began
1995 Court decided in plaintiffs favor finding mental health care in the CDCR inadequate and in violation
of the 8th Amendment
2) 2002 Plata case was settled by agreement specifying that the state would revamp the health care system
3) 2005 due to the state’s inability to comply, the court found that the system was “broken beyond repair”
4) 2006 The court appointed a receiver to take over the medical system
5) 2007 Plaintiffs in Plata and Coleman file appeal to the federal courts for a prisoner reduction order
explaining that overcrowding of California’s prisons is the main reason for the inability to provide
constitutional levels of medical and mental health care for the prisoners.
6) 2011 US Supreme Court orders California to reduce its prison population to 137% of capacity within 2
years
Although the state has been the cited legal entity in these proceedings, none of this has been hidden, and so should have been within the awareness of everyone who contributes to the prison population of California whether on the local, county or state level. We have not just been aware of this problem for a few months, but for a few decades. In my opinion, just as individuals, nurses, doctors, and the National Institutes of Health have all been very slow to adopt preventive measures as ultimately more cost effective, and medically effective than the much more expensive ” rescue” measures, the same has been true for the voters, politicians, lawyers, corrections personnel and officials at all levels who in any way deal with prisoners and the prison population overall. This is a societal problem and will need everyone working collaboratively to address it.
I’m not talking about the state. The county had no idea realignment was coming…
ERM
If it is true that “the county” had no idea realignment was coming, then in my opinion they were simply burying their heads in the sand much the same as the state has done for years while pretending that these legal challenges could be won, and that they would not have to reduce prison population. While I agree that county officials had no way of knowing the details of realignment, I think it is absurd to think that they could not have foreseen that the state would need to reduce the prison population drastically and that they had a role to play. With a little bit of advance planning, I think the prison population could have been limited by not overcharging, not warehousing the mentally ill and releasing those so physically ill as to no longer represent a threat to the community. Also, I see it as a waste of funds to keep those charged but not convicted of non violent, non sexual crimes in jail. Other less expensive means of surveillance have been discussed previously in this blog. These funds then could have been directed to the kinds of programs that rdcanning outlined as is being done in some other counties.